So, I noticed that Microsoft released SP4 for SQL 2000 without really telling us, and I went ahead and installed it on a couple of my SQL machines, bringing their build numbers to 8.00.2039. So far this looks more like a maintence rollup more than anything else. Impressions so far? Well, it was nice they fixed some issues with SQL 2000 running on native x64 platforms, even if they didn't make it actually run in 64 bit. It is bad that they didn't fix Reporting Services so it would work in that environment, but considering how much of a hack Reporting Services is, I am just happy they can get it to work on anything. Anyhow, bitterness aside...

The first thing I noticed, on the first machine I installed it on, the SQL Server services did not restart after completing the installation of Service Pack 4. This was not repeated on the other machines, so most likely I just did not reboot after the install. I really am not real big on rebooting...

The installs themselves went very smooth, SQL Server seems to behave the same as it did before. I don't have SQL 2000 on my 64 bit machine, I have SQL 2005 on it, so I can't speak to that.

They spoke of 'GUI Enhancements' as well as other things, but what I saw I would not necessarily consider enhancements.

As you have surely noticed, when you return a result set in Enterprise Manager and then wander off to get a Dew, upon returning, SQL is threatening to clear the result set because you aren't playing with it anymore. They have update the wording on this and it now looks like this:

The next thing you'll notice that is new, is if you right click a table and choose Design Table, larger tables now 'warn' you that it might take some time to save the changes to the table's schema...well, duh.

 These definitely are geared more towards beginning users and not SQL DBA's who do this as a living. I guess they are just following the pattern of everyone else, targetting the least common denominator. To see another example of this, head over to Borders and see how many books are 'technical' compared to the number of For Dummies books and How to XXXX on Ebay...but I digress into my bitterness again.

The only 'issue' I ran into, I had some recollection of possible GUI changes in the Database Diagram thingie, so I went in and played with it, but it looks pretty much the same, I did however get an error trying to create a database design on one of the databases.

After receiving this error, Enterprise Manager had to be closed and reopened or I would get this error everytime I tried to create a diagram. All in all it appears to be a safe install...'appears', so don't come yelling at me when it hoses your box...

Oh, and unlike Ray and Mike's comments on my last post about SP4, I actually like having an improved BOL, what coder doesn't like better/more documentation?